The Oppressor as hero

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When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? does a good job of going through why the "White person helps lead Oppressed Native People to freedom" plot is at it's heart all about white supremacy. (But don't read the comments)

But I've been thinking about how a lot of ostensibly anti-oppression narratives take this form.

• You have the aristocrat who leads the working classes to freedom, as in the stories described in the beginning of "Historical AUs and race" (which inspired this one a bit)
  
• The able-bodied person who saves the poor disabled people eg "Children of a Lesser God".
  
• The man who saves the poor victimised women eg a lot of Dollhouse.
  
• I'm having trouble thinking of any to do with sexuality but I'm sure they exist. EDIT: "I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry"?
  

And not all of these stories are bad individually. After all, history does have a lot of people who did good works helping those they had privilege over, and their stories are as worth telling as anyone else's.

But what's a problem is
a) that this is seen as the only sort of story worth telling
b) The way this story is generally told

If your intention is to fight an oppression, surely you should act contrary to that oppression, not to reinforce it's biases. The Kyriarchy says that white straight able-bodied upper/middle class men are natural leaders and better than everyone at everything. So having a story where such a character joins a group of non-white/GLBT/disabled/lower class etc characters and immediately proves himself better than them all at everything and their natural leader, not to mention having their POV the only one worth seeing the story through..is not so anti-oppressive a message in my book.

See also why Glee only seems anti-racist if you only identify with the white charcaters.

EDIT: Please note that comments to this post are screened, though so far at worst I've delayed unscreening a comment until I can come up with a good explanation of why I think it's problematic.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you on many of your points, and you raise an interesting problem with Avatar: however, there is something to be said for socially created power constructs. As frustrating as it is, audiences are trained to identify with the white male protagonist, so the trope of the white male protagonist learning about something he was previously extremely ignorant of (and therefore by association, the audience) and experiencing empathy for them acts as a kindergarden vehicle for the audiences; before directly identifying with them. Yeah, we should be over this by now, I agree, but I'm not surprised that the character used to establish empathy with the audience and then through which the audience encounters the new idea then develops into the actualizing character (rather than switching to one of the members of the new idea, be that culture/nation/philosophy/whatever) since all that work narratively on the other character would have gone to waste, so the actualizing character (our white male intro connection character) has to be the most active character narratively, which usually means him being the best at everything. That format is problematic.

However, it does work on the level of grabbing the empathy/projection of the straight white cis ablebodied male more effectively because of that training, and therefore can introduce people to concepts that are foreign to them. I think this format for dealing with the Other is extremely elementary, but on one level it is useful as a tool. No easily-marketable alternatives that would have the same swoop of the demographic are coming to mind at the moment, though I am very tired of movies starring white dudes.

I disagree with your stance on Dollhouse; in individual episodes, it seemed more thematically about the main character (Echo) finding strength/memories/actualization in herself and then having that attempted to be removed by The Man (with less success every time). In the most recent episodes, she is carrying all of her personalities ever all at once, all with different skill sets, experiences, and thought processes, which with time would have given the writers the Superhero with All Powers problem. I'm not arguing that the show is not problematic, but while the "men who save women" is a theme for some (one) of the characters, I disagree that it is the show's main focus.

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Well, for a start I think there's a problem with thinking that all that matters about a would-be anti-racist film is it's effect on white audiences. What about being an inspiration to non-white/POC audience members? Or at the very least, entertaining without making them want to hit their head against a wall at the racism (cutting down the emotional energy wasted on being upset by racism would have a HUGE anti-racist effect, since it would give POC/non-white people more energy to do other things)

I agree that a white protagonist can help audiences identify, and as I said in my post there's nothing inherently wrong with telling stories about white anti-racists. But there are more and less racist ways of telling such stories, and I think they should be in the minority of anti-racist stories we tell (I mean: should feminist stories be mostly about men?). Something that struck me replying to someone above is that I've encountered white "anti-racists" who buy into the white-hero story, and their commitment to anti-racism ends the moment a POC/non-white person contradicts them, or they don't get cookies and gratitude every time they do the least anti-racist thing. Maybe if these people encountered the idea of POC/non-white people controlling their own destiny and taking charge of the anti-racist movement in fiction they wouldn't freak out so badly when they encountered it in person.

I admit my argument about Dollhouse is a little shaky (I don't take it back, but am not certain enough to defend it with much vigour) It was just the best example that came to mind.